12/16/22
By Kevin Taylor
Alma Schools
Each day, as Keith Reeves peers over the day's lesson plans, the 37-year-old Alma Middle School choral director pulls into the AMS parking lot with the same life lessons he learned as a sometimes perplexed elementary student at Cavanaugh Elementary school on the south side of Fort Smith.
By his side, wife Tiffany, who also co-teaches aspiring sixth, seventh, and eighth grader Alma Middle School choir students, has the same end goal — to make their students better people.
But working together? That was always in the cards.
“We became boyfriend and girlfriend at Ramsey Junior High,” laments Keith, whose dad often moved the family from one part of Fort Smith to another while he was growing up. “We might live in Rock Island for a while, or in Fort Smith, but we never stopped going to Fort Smith schools.”
Keith Reeves and the former Tiffany Snow are 2003 graduates of Southside High School. They were in the same choirs together at Ramsey Junior High, Southside High School, and Arkansas Tech.
Working together? No problem.
“We knew we couldn’t do it until we blended everything (teaching styles),” Tiffany Reeves said. “Our discipline and classroom management were already very similar because we were under the direction of the same choir directors, so all of our mentors are the same people.
“We’re very similar in what we’ve done, but we’ve also been in two different classrooms for 14 years.”
Tiffany Reeves has taught at Alma Middle School for the last 14 years. She started her career in Fort Smith.
“I taught at Belle Point Alternative School and Northside my first year,” she said. “I learned a lot. I assisted for one year with Mr. Cromer. I learned a lot about classroom management and about making relationships.
“I might not enjoy teaching this, but I want to make it to where you enjoy learning it, and we’ll figure it out.”
While Keith was cutting his teeth at Alma Middle School (2007-08), and Tiffany doing the same in Fort Smith, he applied for an opening at Ramsey Junior High.
As fate would have it, his wife actually replaced Keith at AMS.
“I told him, ‘Please go interview (Ramsey).’ And then I ended up interviewing for his job,” Tiffany said.
“We just switched,” Keith said.
In 2021-22, Keith was promoted to Southside, his dream job.
But when Alma had an opening at the end of the ‘21-22 academic year, he couldn’t resist getting the chance to work with Tiffany.
“This is our home,” he said.
Good mentors
Keith Reeves didn’t go hungry as a kid. He didn’t go without good clothes, either.
But he said going to school was often more enjoyable than being home.
“For me, the way that I grew up, there were a lot of challenges in my home and a lot of challenges in my family,” Keith explained. “My teachers, specifically a fourth-grade teacher named Miztie Bradley that I had at Cavanaugh Elementary, plus my choir directors, were the more stable adults in my life. I would have been that kid that came in and needed the teacher and needed to talk with them about things going on at home.
“Part of it, whether it sounds cheesy or not, having the opportunity to be able to do that same thing for kids that was done for us, but also to see what we came from and where we are now, and how much our music teachers played a role when that was happening.”
The Reeves’ prospered with outstanding choir directors, too, beginning with longtime Southside choir director Gaye Mings, Winston Turpin Jr., and the aforementioned Mitzie Bradley.
“She was by far my most aspiring elementary school teacher,” Keith said. “I came to school to see her, not to learn, but she made learning fun.”
“Unified, Mrs. Mings was a big inspiration for both of us,” Tiffany said. “Again, all of our choir teachers were alike.”
The same was true of their Arkansas Tech choir director, Gary Morris.
“They all have the same philosophy, and they’re friends with each other,” Keith said. “Each one of them, because they loved us the way we loved them, sort of passed us on to the next one with the expectation of, ‘Hey, you better take care of these kids because they mean a lot to us.’
“Our son (Jasper) now calls Gaye ‘Gigi,’ because they’re still involved in our lives.”
In the beginning
Despite their love for music, and each other, the Reeves’ weren’t sure what direction their lives would take until they did their student teaching internship.
“We both realized we enjoyed that,” Keith said. “I remember thinking, ‘Man, I can make a living teaching kids to read music and sing. It was a combination of loving what we do, but also knowing first hand how important a teacher can play in a kid's life.”
Each morning, when bright-eyed kids push through the double doors to the choir room, they’re greeted by two cheerful teachers. Suddenly, even in 2022, with social media and phones tugging at them, kids immediately aspire to sing.
“It’s not hard to get them engaged if they like the songs they’re singing,” Tiffany said. “If you’re challenging them, and they see we’re taking it so seriously, we have a lot to give to make them progress just within that 43 minutes they’re in our room — that they leave better than when they came in there.
“It’s easy to get them to put down their phones when you have them so engaged with you.”
There have been recent downsides to teaching in 2022, too, though that default can be blamed on the 2020 COVID-19 shutdown.
“One negative change with kids is getting used to having extensions again,” Keith said. “Getting kids to understand that they do have to complete assignments every day and they do have to show up for concerts,” Keith said. “Getting them to rise to the occasion and understand you have to be accountable. They’re very used to flexibility; they’re very used to things getting an extension.
“But they’re getting better.”